Shaan from The Prague Revue sent me an email that my story, Cripples, was out just when it started to rain in Bratislava. It’s not exactly the summer storm that is central to the story, but rather a disgusting, freezing snow/rain mix that will make driving hell, but still. Right about now I prefer to see it as a nice coincidence. I’ll bitch about the weather tomorrow.

I’m risking to become the subject of one of this week’s TNY cartoons in which a lawyer tells his client, a prisoner, that if it’s any help, his sentence was the most e-mailed story of the week, but here I go.

Bushwick Daily is a lovely blog written (and photographed) by the lovely Katarina, a girl in love with her step-neighborhood and its inhabitants. For a healthy dose of that less polished/more daring yet already hip Brooklyn, all you need to do is check out her website. She’ll let you know where to get a great espresso, what local bands to follow and which exhibitions to see. Even better: she’ll get you acquainted with Bushwick residents, the young crowd that decided for Bushwick not only because it’s cheaper but because it rocks, because they believe the energy of the place has not yet become jaded.

Both Katarina and I (and probably most of the people featured on her blog) are newcomers to New York, immigrants. And some of us, before we really allow the kick of the city to overthrow the fear, we armor ourselves with that – to a certain point – faked jadedness. An older story of mine, Immigrante Nouveau, is precisely about that. It came out a couple of years ago on a beloved Slovak zine that, meanwhile, had vanished.
It is now posted on Bushwick Daily as Sunday Read, a category open for submissions from y’all!
And to conclude with my small-prisoner’s glory, it got retweeted by the Not For Tourists Guide. (I know, I know, but they do have a massive following and it makes me feel a little warmer inside).

The house stood next to the belfry where it had always stood; it just seemed smaller, and the pink was more of a pinkish-grey now, dissolving with every flake of the coat peeling off. Yes, it was the kind of winter that exists only in St. Pavol in January—all the bookish heaving, crisping and freezing was happening in real time here.

The huge red gate, the huge gate key, and more keys—to the yard, the kitchen, the back room. I think of my grandfather as a boy; surely he didn’t have to unlock three doors when he was herding the oxen out of the gate with his father. No, there used to be a simple bolt, even I remember using it. That was before we got robbed.

Grandma’s painting got stolen then; the one with the poppies that I never noticed, and then suddenly missed when it was gone. The gypsies did it, people had said. And after that they added quickly, as always when the gypsies were mentioned, not the good ones, the bad ones. One more inevitable sentence would follow: If Betka hadn’t sold the first house to the gypsies back then, we could’ve lived in peace….